Cases are on the rise, but a few small changes would make a big difference to millions of vulnerable people, says Guardian columnist Frances Ryan
And yet, listen toor his ministers and you’d be forgiven for thinking none of this was really happening. As a new coronavirus wave threatens to hit the country once again, the government appears more interested in scrapping human rights than protecting human lives. Welcome to sick man Britain: where the public are left to catch coronavirus repeatedly, and ministers pretend everything is fine.
Back in February, Johnson said the government had created a plan to start “living with Covid”, but what it really did was form a plan to catch and spread Covid. Afterwere dropped on 1 April – from the legal obligation to isolate if you had Covid, to the end of most free testing – the public were left wide open to mass infection. Even hospitals were told by ministers to ditch mask mandates, though some worried trusts have defied the rules and kept them.
One of the biggest problems facing Britain’s attempts to quell the virus is that this government doesn’t really want to. There is hope – the number of people dying from Covid has reduced since its peak – but excessive focus on this has long hidden the fact that loss of life has never been the only thing that matters: how many people are infected with the virus matters too. A strategy that lets the virus rip through the population increases the risk we all face, be it from surges, new dangerous variants, or in developing long Covid.
The likely longterm impact on the economy and society is similarly grim. It means more pressure on an NHS that’s already creaking under the weight of backlogs. It means sickness absences across key sectors and frontline workers, from nurses to teachers. Children missing more school.
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